Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

archaeologymag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 207 posts

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#71

Post by LeifCarrotson »

prometheus76 wrote: post #64
bjornsing wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure you have a 100C heatsink within millimeters, but I still find it surprising that the outside layer of the basket wouldn't burn away slowly. Probably because the water slowly permeates through the outside layer of the basket and evaporates there. A lot of energy can be absorbed that way.

I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition point.

The cup isn't exactly 100C, it's being heated by the flame. But it's only a few hundred microns thick, and the back is in direct contact with the 100C water. One side is exposed to an air/methane flame at around 2000C/3500F, which (while very hot) is a poor thermal conductor, and the other side is in contact with the water. The temperature at the interface is somewhere in the middle.

Also, you do you, but it's probably not a great idea to boil food in plastic cups or "waxed" (often coated in a styrene compound, not real "wax") paper cups...

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#72

Post by dghughes »

Roark66 wrote: post #15

And how could they've done this without language? I've heard this statement that neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language and they did not (something about the way their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds). I call BS on that now. You can't do this kind of stuff without ability to communicate your intentions, future plans, rewards for other people and so on. Next we'll discover the…

>neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language

I think any small groups of humans were just one virus away from extinction. Even we almost disappeared. A species that has a very low population for the entire species then all get sick that is bad even if all do not die. Your species loses genetic diversity and then another virus or even a large natural disaster strikes the group wiping it out. Maybe we just were lucky and survived not due to any skill better than other species.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#74

Post by bluGill »

williamdclt wrote: post #69
jbotz wrote: post #6

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because t…

Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities! Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's n…

> Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's not going to make the pan hotter than 100C while there's a layer of water.

Eventually you boil water off the surface faster than heat can penetrate inside the mushroom and so you can burn the outside while the inside is still wet. How much heat the mushroom can handle before this happens is left as an exercise to the reader.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#75

Post by bluGill »

Isamu wrote: post #58
kadoban wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it me or is it odd that that first paper doesn't seem to cite any source for the misconception they're trying to argue against? I don't see any cites for people who believed that boiling could not happen in fragile containers. So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?

It’s common knowledge, less so now because we never need to do it. But go back in time and it’s common frontier knowledge, you can do this in a pinch. And in Medieval times, you can boil something in a pouch. It’s just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could burn and you could lose everything. It’s just less durable. So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it was. Wouldn’t you want to t…

> Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible?

But what is durable? Pottery is fragile itself, and can break if you heat it too fast. I have not used either pottery or baskets on a fire so I can't comment myself, but I see no reason to think pottery is better. It probably depends partially on the society, if you are nomad hunter-gathers, pottery is heavy and breaks too easily, while farmers can just leave the pottery by where they cook and so it may be better.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#76

Post by detaro »

bluGill wrote: post #75
Isamu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s common knowledge, less so now because we never need to do it. But go back in time and it’s common frontier knowledge, you can do this in a pinch. And in Medieval times, you can boil something in a pouch. It’s just less reliable, the upper part hanging the bag could burn and you could lose everything. It’s just less durable. So anthropologists are likely to argue about how prevalent it was. Wouldn’t you want to t…

> Wouldn’t you want to transition to a more durable way as quickly as possible? But what is durable? Pottery is fragile itself, and can break if you heat it too fast. I have not used either pottery or baskets on a fire so I can't comment myself, but I see no reason to think pottery is better. It probably depends partially on the society, if you are nomad hunter-gathers, pottery is heavy and breaks too easily, while f…

I think mobility is a good shout. Especially large pottery is relatively hard to transport before you have pack-animals or carts.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#77

Post by bluGill »

14 wrote: post #13
jbotz wrote: post #6

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because t…

Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right. But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and…

Notice that all of your proposed pots will biodegrade in a few decades (centuries in the best case) thus leaving no evidence behind. There are many options, and we can easily test to show many of them work. However there is no way to know which method(s) they used.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#78

Post by AlotOfReading »

netcan wrote: post #19
14 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right. But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and…

>But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? "Pottery" tends to assume ceramics. In Neolithic and later sites that had pottery, ceramic remains typically represent 99% of the total artifacts. Bronze age tel sites are littered with ceramic pebbles. Every pot eventually becomes a bunch of shards and pebbles that last forever. That said... a material culture that only uses ceramics occasionally wouldn't lea…

No archaeologist would call hide or wood pottery and ceramics don't turn into pebbles. Occasional ceramic use can be very visible archaeologically if the pottery preserves. It's an inert material in the absence of water, after all. In the presence of water though, it turns into dust rather than pebbles.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#79

Post by bluGill »

freetime2 wrote: post #7

>The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing bones to access the marrow—a behavior shared by their earliest African ancestors—also crushed them into fragments and boiled them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource. I wish the article went into more details about how they boiled the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling them is not all that impressive. And then I thoug…

This is likely a case of we cannot know. There are many options that we know would work - that would biodegrade in just a few decades.

The breakthrough is the claim that they were doing this.

Re: Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore

#80

Post by tremon »

cyco130 wrote: post #54
contrarian1234 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think a community of deaf people wouldn't be able to do it? :)

Deaf homo sapiens sapienses do have perfectly good language skills.

The original argument was that neanderthals didn't have good language skills because "their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds". Pointing out that deaf or mute humans still have complex language skills seems like an adequate counterargument to me.
Post reply on HN